1. Field
This application relates generally to software management and more specifically to systems and methods for programmatically monitoring and managing deployments of software applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
A variety of commercially available software tools exist for monitoring and providing information about software deployments. These products typically (1) allow a user to statically specify certain aspects about a specific software deployment, (2) monitor those aspects, and (3) alert the user when the monitored aspects cross specified performance thresholds. These products do not provide any automated analysis of monitored data. They are best suited for simple automated monitoring tasks and then presentation of the monitored information in reports, which requires the user to manually analyze the reports to extract relevant conclusions about the specific deployment. Examples of these types of products include NetIQ's AppManager™ and Microsoft's MOM™.
The following well-known equation describes the availability (A) of a system:
  A  =      1          1      +              MTTR        MTTF            wherein MTTF is the Mean Time to Failure and MTTR is the Mean time to Repair. Based on this equation, the availability of the system is increased by a decreasing MTTR and an increasing MTTF. Currently available tools provide monitoring capabilities that alert IT staff when problems occur. A single problem can result in multiple problematic events. As a result, IT staff have to manually triage the problems to pinpoint the root-cause problem that caused the set of problems. This manual triage increases MTTR. It also reduces the operational efficiency of the IT staff, because they have to spend a significant portion of their time troubleshooting the problems. Also, currently available tools are extremely limited in their ability to continuously optimize a system or alert the IT staff to possible impending failures (for example due to the possible exhaustion of resources), thereby resulting in a limited MTTF. Therefore, currently available tools have a significant MTTR and limited MTTF, resulting in a relatively low availability A.